News from the world of maths: Maths maps musical emotion

Submitted by plusadmin on May 16, 2006

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Maths maps musical emotion

Music makes emotion and maths underpins music. But can the emotional part of music be captured by maths? To find the answer to this question Elaine Chew, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, set up a graduate course called "Computational Modelling of Expressive Performance" to look for answers. The aim of the course is to teach
students how to use tools from engineering and computation to understand our emotional responses to music.

Chew pursues a successful career as a pianist along side her research, and so is perfectly qualified. But as she admits, teaching the course is a challenge, as students need expertise from a huge range of different disciplines. They need to use tools from music theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, signal processing and neuroscience, to name but a few.
Not many students have the necessary pre-requisites, but some of those that do have now put an exhibition of their projects online.

One pair of students have created "emotiongrams" that map musical characteristics to colour patterns to capture their emotional impact. Another project involves analysing scores of silent movies that have been specifically created to evoke certain emotions, and yet another one involves a system that allows you to add extra rules to a musical score and observe whether this changes the impact on
your feelings.

You can read about all the projects on the course website. Plus has a number of articles on the mathematics of music, which you can find in our archive under keyword or topic "maths and music".